Do you know the feeling of being overwhelmed by all the work and tasks you have to do today? There are times where I manage all this very good and then there are times where I struggle a lot with “getting everything done”. But when I really think about what is important, what needs to be finished today it’s usually very little. If I need to choose two things to finish on a day, it’s doable. The problem…

Today I got up early and instead of cooking a coffee and then sit in front of my screen to read emails I went out to the forest. There’s nothing more relaxing than the early hours in a forest, especially in autumn when fog is around and there’s only nature and you.

Today I read Apple’s Environment Responsibility Report 20181. I’m amazed how detailed it is, how readable, understandable and exemplary it is. It’s not just a official report that is necessary. Instead, they chose to make it great for everyone and use it as marketing instrument. Instead, they chose to make it great for everyone and use it as marketing instrument. And I like that because it makes…

When Apple presented the iPhone Xr this year I was tempted to buy it as soon as possible. This was in total contrast to what I wanted to do before the announcement—not buying a new phone this year. Every two years my contract with Vodafone renews and gives me the chance to get a new smartphone. And every time Apple holds a keynote they achieve to convince people that their new product is more a…

On Wednesday I was asking a colleague what his plans for today are and he replied that he’s on his way to go surfing but would have about 15 minutes to talk about our project now if I like. I thought that’s way enough time to talk about task management etc and called him while he was on the bus to the beach. But I was wrong; he didn’t wanted to talk about tasks but about our problem of the last three…

The Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says in this Recode Code 2018 Video that he wants Uber to be the Amazon of transportation. It baffles me that a billion dollar company cannot come up with a better vision than to compare itself and copy a concept from Amazon. Shira Ovide from Bloomberg tends to agree but Uber still is valued billions of Dollars and while not profitable at all, still gets a lot of…

I’m collecting a list of companies or products that are not only over-financed hipster brands but instead have a real purpose as a company to succeed and be sustainable from the start. Ideally, the companies or products should also care about ethics and mostly about the human side of their clients. As an example, the outdoor company Patagonia would be an example of a sustainable company which c…

As you can already see this site has gotten a new look yesterday. But not only a new look but a new technical basis and a new content strategy. In the past I had a website showing what I do as developer. But I am much more than a developer and people want to know about it as well. In times where you know a lot of people virtually from Twitter or other social media networks, it’s even more i…

Today I read an interview which I really enjoyed. It contained some great inspiration tipps but one thing is still stuck in my head: “I … start my day by meditating. … I then rush to get to work by 9am” —Interview Maria Gonzalez from Slack at InterfaceLovers Please don’t ruin your meditation practice immediately afterwards. Try to establish a day led by your meditation practice—calm, focused, reflected.…

Here’s a bold statement: Using acronyms is hurting people. Elon Musk already declared a company rule effective for all employees in 2010, effectively ending the use of acronyms and appreviations for the entire company: “Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to …

Katie Womersley: “(…) our global spread means almost 24/7, Slack is a hub of activity and people feel they’re missing out on work. This is especially tough on our Asia-Pacific teammates, who end up left out of discussions and conversations, and folks with responsibilities who needed to work different hours and be offline during parts of their workday (like parents!).” I’m so familiar with this feeling. …

Here we go, that’s my new Espresso machine, a Rocket Giotto v3 together with a Mazzer Mini B grinder. After years with my still beloved and quite satisfying Saeco Aroma which stays with me since over 8 years now, I decided to level up a bit. I’m still very new to the new machines and it’s certainly different to my previous machine. The espresso tastes totally different to what I’m used to (much more fl…

Flattr just announced they’re now part of eyeo, makers of AdBlock Plus. Time to say goodbye, and no it’s mainly due to a different reason. When Flattr announced their revamped product yesterday via email, they also announced that they’re now part of eyeo (they seem to already be, without notifying anyone earlier). That’s a huge bummer as the makers of AdBlock Plus are a highly questionable company…

There’s a very well written quiz on the New York Times. It’s called: “The Big Five tech companies increasingly dominate our lives. Could you ditch them?”—and here’s my public response and some thoughts on it. This note is inspired by Jeena’s post on this topic, in which he shares his personal result list. My order of dropping tech giants First of all, note that this isn’t an order of relevance but of my perso…

“B2B SaaS pricing is out of control. Everyone is pricing their service for endlessly-funded startups or enterprise.”—Jonnie Hallmann on Twitter Maybe—just a thought—Venture Capital isn’t spread everywhere anymore. Maybe startups need to finally think about having a sustainable business model and maybe that is why so many services start to charge more money than we’re used to. If you need Circle CI with 5 con…

Tobias Tom sent me this article over the weekend and I really liked to read it. Michael Bromley shares good points in why maintaining open source projects is so hard, while creating projects is very easy. He acknowledges that an open source author has “taken on a small portion of responsibility to you as a user of my code”, and points out one of the most important facts that users of open source pro…

Today I noticed that a couple of big websites do prevent me from checking a URL’s HTTP Status Code via curl. See the following header response from a Medium-served custom-domain (doesn’t happen with medium.com URLs): curl -I https://shift.newco.co/how-a-single-conversation-with-my-boss-changed-my-view-on-delegation-and-failure-ae5376451c8d HTTP/1.1 409 Conflict Error 409: The request could not be …

As of today, I decided to put both my accounts to a “private” state. This means only people that I follow and that follow me will be able to read my tweets. It’s the result of a small and unimportant harassment incident that made me realize how shitty the service really is when you need support. A week ago I received my first harassment tweet by a politically differently oriented person. In Germa…

Setting up S/MIME is actually not that hard. That said, it’s probably still too nerdy for a normal user so this type of email encryption is likely not something for non-technical people. You need a Email certificate by an authority Of course you could create a certificate yourself but then no one would trust this manually so it’d be useless. However, there are a very few providers that offer S/M…

With 16500 email readers and tens of thousands readers online, my WDRL project seems to be of big interest for many people. Understandable if we take into account how hard it is to keep up to date with web development technology. But how is this continuous research project financed? Mostly by myself. And that’s a problem. After four in terms of acceptance successful years, my project is still c…